Wednesday, February 01, 2012

We Disengage, We Turn the Page

Again, I’d happily vote for Romney over Obama. And I’d be fine with Romney crushing Obama with negative ads, if that was remotely possible. And there are plenty of things one could say to defend Romney on the merits of what he says here. But great politicians on the morning after a big win, don’t force their supporters to go around defending the candidate from the charge that he doesn’t care about the poor. They just don’t.

After eight years of cringing through the ups and downs and ideological inconsistencies of the Bush administration and the 2008 campaign trying to pretend that John McCain-a fundamentally good man-actually represented a conservative choice for America’s future, a lot of us are tired of having to put up with Republican politicians that we can’t wholeheartedly support or really believe in. So let me officially state that I am not going to go down that road with Mitt Romney.

I’ll leave that to the Hugh Hewitts, Ann Coulters, and Ramesh Ponnurus of the world. You’ve been selling us on Romney’s electability and telling us that he’s the only one who can beat President Obama in November. Fine. Now that it appears almost certain that your dreams of Romney at the top of the Republican ticket are going to come true, you’re going to have your chance. You get to be the ones who can explain away blunders like this morning’s. You get to keep telling people that RomneyCare is in no way related to ObamaCare. You get to describe for us how Romney’s tepid and uninspired economic plan is going to turn things around. You get to justify the fact that at a time when the American people are itching for a serious debate about the future paths the country could and should take, Romney has demonstrated neither the ability nor inclination to put forth a strong argument for a conservative vision as an alternative to President Obama’s.

The way things are looking now, we’re going to be in for a LONG campaign. And an even longer four years after that with President Obama in the White House.